In the olden days, before the virus struck, my bread making was very reliable. I had been using the same flour (from Waitrose) and the same recipe (evolved by trial and error) for a long time, possibly years. Then the run on flour at the start of the outbreak meant that while I never ran out, I was using all different kinds of flour, some of which readers who are both attentive and retentive will recall.
Since then, the first rise has continued to be satisfactory, but the second rise has become rather unpredictable, in particular the holding of the second rise. The bread has become far too likely to collapse before I get it into the oven or shortly after I get it into the oven. To be fair, usually this means that the dome on the top collapses, with the bread underneath being largely unscathed. So the bread in the second snap at reference 2 looks all very well, but on opening the nice dome probably turned out to be mainly a large bubble, with the body of the bread only coming up to the level of the rims of the tins.
Not the case however with the bread in the first snap, which had nearly completely collapsed and had to start rising all over again.
Part of the problem has been one of timing, with the second rise coming to the boil, as it were, during lunch, and with my thinking that all will be well, rather than disturb my meal. Another part has been the acceleration of the second rise, starting slow and finishing fast, which makes it hard to know in advance when it will be ready.
For the next batch, I shall start really early, in the hope of it being finished before lunch. Or at least in the oven and on the timer before lunch. I shall also stop going for the big domes, settling for bread which rises just above the rims - which probably amounts to the doubling of volume which was given as a rule of thumb by the trainer at the bread making class I once went to. A trainer who, as it happens, had been an IT trainer in real life. An event briefly noticed at reference 3.
As it has turned out, batch 572 was the first outing for the pre-historic flour noticed at reference 4, this two month gap being some evidence of my own panic buying. Baking has been steady at around a batch a week, each batch requiring about a kilo and a half of flour, but BH has been grabbing such wholemeal as has been available at Sainsbury's. While for the strong white, I have settled on 16kg bags of Alto flour from Wright's of Ponders End, for the time being anyway.
The pre-historic flour turned out to be odd looking stuff, more like a brown icing sugar than a regular wholemeal. The bread baked pale, with a rather fine, very even crumb, something like that of the wholemeal I used to buy in the commercial bakery in Gerrard Street. Very good it was too, now long gone, but returned to life by the combination of Google and Pinterest in the snap above, taken in 1980, only a few years after I used to use the place. Just now a dim-sum joint called Wan Chai Corner, having been various establishments of the same sort before that.
Whereas the present bread was a little too firm for my liking - which runs to the lightness of much of what is called granary in bread shops. But not so keen on the lumps therein.
This bread was also subject of a collapse. Looked OK and some way off being ready before we started lunch and had risen to nice domes by the time that we finished. But it collapsed more or less as soon as I had put it in the oven, recovering a bit to give the result snapped above. Not too bad, and the bread inside was not too bad either, but not what I am looking for and not what had been the norm in the olden days, as explained above.
Further report in due course.
PS 1: Google continue to fiddle with the posting template that I use, with this morning's twiddle being that images appear by default left justified and refuse to move back to the centre, despite their being a widget to do that. Tiresome of them. Been going on for weeks now.
PS 2: from the firmness of bread, I associate to the firmness of salt beef. At about the time I used to use Dugdale & Adams, I was also using a salt beef place in Great Windmill Street, not very far away from Chinatown, a place decorated with arty, signed, black & white photographs of boxers. The salt beef there was excellent - and loose. While salt beef these days is all too often very firm, almost as if it has come out of tin like its manufactured cousin, corned beef. They also did very good chicken soup and very good potato pancakes, these last being known there as latkes.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/disaster-567.html.
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